10 Tips- How Can Social Media Marketing Help Your Business Grow

Hey, in this article, we’ll be sharing our top 10 social media strategies and
tips for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Social media has a huge opportunity to be a brand awareness and sales tool for your business but social media can also be a huge challenge for those who run small businesses or entrepreneurs but these 13 tips and strategies are going to help you as small businesses and entrepreneurs prioritize what’s important on social media so that you can grow your accounts and drive sales. let’s kick things off with number one.

1 Make Social Media Priority

Social media can be a real challenge.So our top tip to you as small businesses and entrepreneurs is to make social media a priority for you and your business and your employees start  by planning to create a strategy, create goals what do you see as success with social media. Is it brand awareness, is it sales, is it somewhere in between having a plan will help you make that commitment to social media right from the beginning so starting with the plan understanding that tools are going to help you achieve that plan and then looking outside to your peers and competitors for what’s working for them is a great place to start and our number one tip for entrepreneurs and small businesses

2 Establishing Some Goals

 This goes back to what we mentioned briefly in number one and that’s establishing some goals for your social media program everything starts and ends with goals and setting proper goals based on desired outcomes is the most important thing that you can do it’s super important to develop a social media strategy that aligns with your goals so that you can determine whether your social media program is successful or not. Creating goals it’s important to be specific as possible so if you’re using social media to drive brand awareness what are the metrics around that goal that will help you to define brand awareness, is it likes traffic to your website engagement to social media post or somewhere in between having specific goals based on specific objective is the first step in creating great goals and the first step in understanding whether your social media is working and of course those are super important because if you’re off the path and you’re not finding success with social media goals will help you to define the next action step needed to take to get back on the path of success on social media

3 Remember to Share Who You Are A Brand Or A Business

 For small businesses and entrepreneurs on social media is to remember to share who you are as a brand or a business remember that social media is social people are on social media to share content with their friends connect with family members and yes of course connect with you as a brain but people won’t want to connect with your brand unless you’re sharing things that are human authentic engaging things that speak to people on a human level which is very meta I know it’s hard to point directly to what that means but the best We can do is to tell you to remember to share who you are what makes you unique as an entrepreneur or small business is it your values is that your company is it your employees is your product what

makes you special why would people want to follow you on social media what would make them want to share your content with your friends what makes you unique as a company what makes you unique personality wise and also keep in mind that creating content isn’t necessarily just showing how your product can benefit your users it’s about helping people it’s about providing useful relevant content time and time again so that they go to you as a trusted source of inspiration.

• 

4 Setting Time Aside For Social Media.

Setting time aside for social media we know this can be the hardest thing to do as entrepreneurs and small businesses at buffer we all wear multiple hats and finding time for social media wasn’t necessarily a priority for us until we saw the power of what social media can do for our brand but let’s take a step back the key to establishing a great social media presence is sharing great social media content and for busy business owners taking the time to create great content can easily be pushed aside which is okay what we encourage you to do is to take time and batch time dedicated to social media content creation find your most creative time is it Monday morning is it Friday afternoons set aside some specific time each week even every single day occur supreme vicious to create great social media content and engage with your fans on social media because after you put out great social media content people are going to want to talk to you they’re going to want to comment on your links they’re going to want to ask you questions about you in your business a few hours a week 20 minutes a day even will help you get ahead on social media by ensuring that you’re dedicating time to it which is one of the most important factors about creating a great community speaking of great content

5 Listen To Your Customers

Listen to your customers rather than just simply promote it one of the best things about social media is that it offers an open-ended community to communicate one-on-one with potential customers and current customers that type of open-ended communication is rare these days and so social media offers that opportunity to small businesses entrepreneurs whose customer base might be smaller to start  so connecting one-on-one is super important when you’re looking to grow your social media community when you’re first starting  so what we mean by listening to your customers is what kind of questions are they asking in community forums in your product on social media are these ideas for potential blog topics social media content videos you name it taking the approach of listening to your customers rather than simply promoting your product not only gives you greater insights into your customer’s preferences their fears their challenges but it also builds a loyal customer base that you can lean into later down the line.

6 Focusing Your Efforts 

You’ve probably heard the saying it’s better to be on one social media network than spread thin across many wells that statement is true by focusing your efforts on one social media platform as opposed to two-three or four you’re going to hone your skills you’re going to learn the nuances of that channel and only until you figured out that specific channel can you start to branch out to more social media networks we think the biggest misconception for small businesses and entrepreneurs is the amount of time it takes to be successful on a social media channel takes a lot of time takes a lot of effort takes a lot of content and so by focusing your efforts on one channel you increase your likelihood of success tenfold maybe more

7 Automating Your Processes.

So we’ve already talked about the benefits of using tools like Buffer to schedule your social media posts and analyze your posts but there’s a lot of other processes that you can automate in the time that will help you be successful on social media once you start to get the feel for what kind of content is working on social media you can use tools to add articles that you add to your pocket account for example or you can use tools like Canva Animato to quickly create graphics for videos saving you hours of time in the process you can hire an intern to help you create graphics or videos or schedule social media posts there’s tons of people out there are willing and looking for great work social media possibilities are endless when it comes to automation so using tools like buffer it was like camber Animoto Zapier  hiring out work to help with the more tedious tasks are all things that businesses and entrepreneurs should be thinking about if you want to focus your time on more important tasks like running your business speaking of tools.

8 Picking The Right Tools

When thinking about tools as a small business or entrepreneur we like to break it down into five different sections of potential tools you have your collaborate tools your attractive tools your acquired tools you retained tools and your measuring tools those five tools will help you be successful on a daily basis under the collaborate tools this is how you’re going to help collaborate with freelancers employees within your company tool like slack Google Dropbox paper Trello are all great project management tools that will help you collaborate on things or ideas that you think will be successful on social media under the attract stage this is where you get to implement a lot of fun tools that will help you attract customers both on social media and another marketing efforts as well so tools like WordPress to help you write blog posts or manage your website Mail-chimp to send emails buffer to send social media posts like we said before canva Animoto to help you create videos and graphics number three the acquire stage is where you start to see more robust tools in the acquisition stage of your customer journey so CRM like Hub Spot Salesforce Marketo Mail Chimp to send email drip campaigns buffer to continue to send out your social media posts then of course you have your retain tools and these could be things like NPS scoring surveys type form to help you send out customer surveys offer to continually send out social media Mail chimp to send automated emails to your customers based on specific actions you can also use advertising platforms like Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Interest to help re market to customers who have been on your website and then, of course, last but not least number five is the measurement stage of tools this is where you implement things like Adobe Analytics Google Analytics lots of options out there to measure how you’re doing o social media and to help as we said before direct those steps of actions towards the things that are going to work in the future.

9 Creating A Social Media Calendar.

Having a comprehensive overview of everything you want to send out to social media within the next few months even within the year is irreplaceable for brands and businesses looking to be successful on social media a good social media calendar consists of major company events major company product releases and major holidays within whatever country or even the world that you want to celebrate as a company a great social media strategy means posting consistently and what better way to do that then to hold yourself accountable through a Content calendar create a unique calendar it can be an Excel spreadsheet it could be a Google Doc it doesn’t matter how you do or whatever calendar service that you prefer create a map whatever the event is put it in your social media calendar create a small mini-marketing plan around that event and make sure to have all the messaging set up so that is a small business when you go to post you’re all set to go your calendars ready to go and you have a great social media posting.

• 

10 Learning From The Best

First to admit that we don’t have a ton of resources we don’t have a lot of time to commit to creating great content we just don’t have what bigger better brands have in terms of social media resources so the best thing you can d as a business leader is to follow peers and competitors both inside and outside your industry you can follow them by creating Twitter lists or using Facebook pages to watch tool to set up a list of brands that you know post consistently great content then once you have a list of great brands or influencers in your industry check back once in a while what are they posting about are they using videos are they using photos are they using text only updates what kind of things are they talking about subjects types of content having a deep  understanding of the trends and the things that are working in your industry will do wonders for your social media content and not only that watching others within your industry will spark ideas like you can’t understand until you’ve actually been there and seen content in its wonderful creation process so get out there create a list of great brands in your industry. That’s all try them out and let us brandolyfic in comments whether they are helpful or not.